Evolution of the stay-at-home mom

I think that it has been great that I have basically been able to stay home and play with my kids all the time they have been small. Hopefully now that they are in school (at least if there aren't any more at the tail end here) I will be able to help Slade bear the burden of the bills. In fact I am hoping that my writing portfolio continues to accelerate in the income it generates so I can avoid the immense feeling of guilt I have at having caught a free ride off of his hard back breaking labor while I am home playing.

And my ability to do so is so new in the history of the world. Some people think that there is some kind of reference to stay at home mothering in the Bible or other scripture, but it wasn't even heard of at that time. It has come about in less than the last two hundred years.

The new ancient history of working women

Not that mothers didn't take care of their children. Well actually sometimes they didn't. In Tudor England, for example, poor people farmed out their toddlers until they were about three years old to wet nurses. Rich people did too, just different wet nurses. Most of these poor young babies died before their reunions with their parents. It was very sad indeed, for everyone. But people were struggling to even have a roof over their head and food on the table and they did what they had to do.

The origins of the stay at home mother had roots in the Industrial Revolution. That is when men started leaving the house to go to other places of employ in large numbers. There were some types of work that involved this before like seamen, military worker, doctor, courtier, etc. But for everyday income earners to leave in the morning and return home at night was a product of the rise of the factory in the 1800's. The reason that women didn't work in factories at this early time was not that there was any sense that they should stay at home. It was that men got hired first and there were very rarely enough jobs to go around to make women seem like an attractive employee.

But this didn't mean that women weren't busy contributing to the economics of the household. And this didn't just mean cooking cleaning and shopping. I think the example of Lucy Smith is a good one. She did as much farming as anyone else and actually made what was probably a higher hourly wage when she was able to do it when she painted those floor and table cloths for sale. That was clearly a job in every sense of the word for the early 1800's. She didn't leave the house to do it (not always, she did from time to time (leaving the kids at home to go work as a domestic worker on occasion) and to sell her cloths she would have had to take them into market since there wasn't ebay. These two types of work probably meant that she was away from home MORE than her husband, who oversaw the farm at home and would have had the young children doing farm apprenticeship with him).

But she definitely didn't get to stay home more the Jo Senior. Her boys left the house a lot but that was because they were able bodied enough to be day laborers, which neither she nor her husband were able to do. She would have taken domestic work as much as she could have during hard times, however, leaving very young children at home with other children or relatives. This was most likely what every woman at the time did. Extended families living under one roof and very young children left alone or with other children made it so that babysitting was always less of an issue when families were large and housing small.

Changing history of working women in the Industrial Revolution

The sense that women SHOULD stay home and not work was probably unheard until a bit later, at least not just staying at home for the sake of it, which would have seemed absurd. Like 'let them eat cake,' in fact EXACTLY like that. When the factories rose in the large cities men left the house, but when they could so did women and children. Women often sent their children to live with relatives or hired workers for years at a time when they were able to find regular work (in Les Mis Fontine's job was coveted and things turned upside down when she got dismissed. She wasn't rich before this but there was a sense that she had extras. She sent Cozette a rather extravagant wardrobe (that was sold off by her keepers) and she had furniture, candles and stationery, which were considered luxuries).

What really excellerated the concept that women were expected to stay home and not appreciably contribute to family finances were the two world wars in the twentieth century. Women started working in large numbers during this time to man factories, hospitals, storehouses and farms. At the end of the first world war women often didn't keep their jobs in the twenties not because they were expected not to but because they didn't need to. (Remember the relatively independent flapper girl? She often had a job and sometimes even education. My grandmother entered a university in 1918, graduated with a teaching degree and worked as a teacher on and off until she was retirement age, marrying at age 30 and only having three children. Relatively modern sounding.)

Women had relatively few children during the twenties and thirties and the ones that weren't heavily saddled with their families were able to work and kept the available jobs that existed over and above the returning men. So probably there weren't GOOD jobs available enough to tempt womein into the work force, but the economy was good enough that those that wanted to and had opportunities to kept their jobs and no on really said much about it. Poor women probalby continued to make informal contributions to the family income in the 1920s and very few womeon OR men had good jobs during the depression.

WWII changed things rather drastically. The whole pre-war and war era was brutal to the world economy and it took a while for things to get going again. Europe and Asia took ten years before they came back out of third world status, not even having a baby boom like we did, and so the united states didn't really even have a viable trading partner again for a decade. So when the men came back and the government didn't want to pension all of the veterans at 100 percent, the concept of moral obligation of women to stay at home with their children was introduced among the American population.

The notion that women shouldn't work existed before in some sectors of the culture, but in a different form. Mainly in pre world war era, there was still the sense that women who worked in the workplace with men were whores. It wasn't actually just a sense. It was stated openly by everyone from clergy at the pupit to government officials. The whole issue with birth control and Margaret Sanger, etc. was that Sanger thought that women should have the ability to control their reproductive system so they could support themselves and their families in the work place. There was not the argument in response to Sanger that women should stay home with their children the response was that the notion of women working and controling pregnancy to do so was obscene. Discussion of and literature on birth control was ruled by law to constitue obscenity.

Before the 1940s when women entered the workplace because they were needed, there was the sense that only women of loose morals went to work in factories alongside men. People didn't want their children taught by women teachers unless they were clearly spinsters or old women because of this prejudice; people believed that women who worked were loose and they were a bad influence on the youth. There was usually a flood of retired women into the teaching profession because most people accepted old women teaching because there was not a sense that they would be whores at retirement age.

But there was a bit of a problem after world war II because there was a wholesale virtual seduction of women into all maners of jobs because the economy needed them. The economy was much more highly industrialized after cars and telophones becamse prominent, making commuting to work and offices more of a practical necessity for many kinds of employemnt.

There was also the notorious baby boom, too. There were several reaosns for the baby boom and probably it is not that well understood. One of the things that caused the baby boom was the introduction of antibiotics to avoid puperal fever and hence a drastic reduction in death of children and women in child birth. Also the introduction of pain killers during child birth meant that fewer women avoided it than had in previous decades. Birth control became widely practiced for the first time in the twenties and thirties largely because women were able for the first time to successfully limit their families in other ways than death. But the surge in marriage and romance that the war generated (absense making the heart fond) combined with a new optimism that hospitals doctors and medicines could remove tragedy from the equation led to a new enthusiasm for families. This made a very practical situation that one could point to; making the need for women to be at home something that was very easy to point to.

So after telling women they were needed in the work force also involved dispelling the rumors about women in the working world being loose. Wholesome images of Rosie the Riveter assembling cars and tanks were proliferated not just to encourage women to work but also to make the public more accepting that these women were a positive presence in society and not to be feared and loathed like they had been before.

So by the time soliders from the War returned and needed their jobs back, the old prejudices against working women no longer worked. It was rightly viewed as old fashioned superstition to view women that worked in food factories or chemical plants were a step below prostitutes. There was actually some attempt to try it, even, and it had been to thoroughly devistated, thank goodness.

So there was a need for an introduction of a new prejudice to take its place. The women's place is in the home slogan was certainly not something from Adam and Eve, or any place in the bible or old fashioned society. In fact that notion is very modern. It is less than a hundred years old.

One of the easiest ways that you can tell as a historian what people are doing in large numbers are to look through church sermons and politician's platforms for prohibitions. If you read 'don't spit on the sidewalk' in a public ordinance there will be a very good indication there that people WERE spitting on the sidewalk. You won't see that in a society that never spits on the sidewalk.

So that is why the sense that women shouldn't work is a product of the 1950s and afterward, because that is when women first had the option to work outside the home in large numbers and men found them to be unwelcome competition for the types of work that they had before that been unqualified for and society had successfully kept them from being able to by notions that most of us find ridiculously offensive.

The sense of women choosing to not work for moral reasons is newer still. That is probably about as old as the 1980s when ET Benson said it to the church women. And it certainly is good counsel in many ways. I certainly believe that it is a good thing that we are so wealthy as a society that we can finally afford what is most definitely a luxury of the first world in proportions that are new to history. As I said, I feel completely indulged that i am able to enjoy my children's childhood with them. But whether I am doing something that women have always done since Eve is arguably historically inaccurate, whether or not I feel (as I do) that it most definitely SHOULD have been because of how great it is. Unfortunately as in many other ways, women have had too hard of a life to do this. They had to strap their babies to their backs and keep them in pens if they had them at home at all, as they had to get up and start dinner before dawn if they were to have any.

History has been brutal. The good old days in many cases were really never very good. Most of us get the opposite impression, that things are getting worse all the time, but this is clearly a way they are getting better. I am very grateful. The curse of Eve is over in more ways than one. I don't have to bear children in sorrow. Or raise them in sorrow. Just like my husband doesn't really have to much sweat on his brow to earn our bread, child birth and child raising is now quite a pleasant experience. I am grateful for the advances of my country and modern medicine that have contributed to that happy reality.